


We Listened To The Distant Call

by ArvenaPeredhel



Category: The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Atani Week 2020, Gen, but like Atani religion?, this is a v religious fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-07
Updated: 2020-01-07
Packaged: 2021-02-27 06:47:52
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,562
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22152769
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ArvenaPeredhel/pseuds/ArvenaPeredhel
Summary: But the third said "I have found a love/That Time and the World shall never move."for Atani Week 2020, day 1 - the story of the Old Hope
Comments: 3
Kudos: 17





	We Listened To The Distant Call

**Author's Note:**

> This is very much a religious fic? But the prompt for Atani Week day 1 is "Men, the Sun, Eru, and the two Dark Lords". It can't really NOT be religious.

We walk through shadow, through sunlight, through stars and through clouds. We walk through fire, and mountain, and drought, and deluge. We walk, ever-trusting, ever-sure, ever-certain. We are the children of the Sun, and our hope is the old hope.

I am sure that my descendants will call me mad, for there is naught I can give them in assurance of this truth. Only the words from my lips, steadfast and unwavering, passing on the truth of all truths that I have seen, have known, have witnessed. I am an old woman now, tolerated in my eccentricities and at once valued and valueless; there is nothing I might do to change that except perhaps turn back time and slip out of my skin. I am not counted a wise woman, I am not numbered among the mothers of our clan; this is the price I pay for holding to what I carry in my heart.

You must understand, child, that we did not always walk. Once we were not the Seekers, those who strive westward after the setting daystar. We lived and died in peace in a far-off place drenched in sunlight, and built ourselves up from nothing, and our homes were crafted of wood and stone. We had few herds, and little skill - we were newly-awoken, learning all and teaching ourselves to speak and to name each new thing that crossed our path. But we were restless, even then, and even then there were stories of something more.

No doubt you have heard the tale of the Voices, of the darkness and the light and the doom we carry that is passed on through blood. But there is more to that story than those who rule our clans will say. We did not leave our homes because of shadows alone. Ah, I see it in your eyes - you sense a story, the lot of you. Well. Sit down, and stoke the fire, and I shall tell you all.

It began with a dream - with my dream, the first in all the garden to flower. I woke from my slumber one morning, weeping and inconsolable. I had seen a strange thing in my sleep, you see - a feast in a great hall filled with people in white garments of a kind I had never known any of our people to wear. There were torches on the walls, and the floor was crafted of a single solid violet gem, polished until you could see your face in it when you looked down, and there were great tables set out covered in white cloths, and the plates were made of gold. Men, and women, and children alike - all sat at the tables, and all were served from the high dais where the great chieftains had their places. Now you must not scream when I tell you this next thing, you must hold fast to your courage, you are Seeker children and you do not shy away from hard truths - there was meat served to each of us, cut by the great lord who was in the place of honor at the high table, and it was pale and bloody, and it was the meat of a man who had been slain. I could see him lying on the table, arms outstretched. And - this is the frightful bit, that so terrified me as a girl-child - the face of the dead man was the same as that great lord who carved and served each portion. It was himself that he sliced to pieces, that he fed to every hungry mouth in that great hall. Of course, I was petrified, and I wept when I woke, and I did not understand.

My mother called it a nightmare, and I believed her, and I thought no more of the dream until two days later, when my friend Bethala was found half-dazed in her bedroom, clutching fast to a stick of charcoal, covering the plaster walls with intersecting lines. We all came to see the marvel, once she had woken and been taken to the elders of our clan, and none understood, but I looked at them and saw the arms of that dead-and-living man, and I knew she must have seen the same thing. You do not know Jineh - she was the matriarch when I was a girl, and I am old now - but she spoke to Bethala, and then to me, and her eyes were sharp and canny.

“You have seen truth,” she said, looking first to Bethala and then to me. “The Voice does not speak to us now, but we still hear the distant call, its echoes coming down from the years.”

And there were more, who dreamed, all the same and all different - Shonu saw the Sun, and then the dark-haired dark-eyed woman who wears her glory for a cloak, and Corilo dreamed of a great dragon that hungered for the blood of a baby, and Vendrid could not close her eyes for a week without the sight of a great red flower consuming her nights. I, too, dreamed, too much to tell you now, but I can see each vision in my memory at a thought. We knew, as we woke, what that meant, we dreamers united in this strangeness. It was a message, and a promise, and what it meant was “You are not forgotten.”

Our elders and matriarch and chieftains began to divine the truth of the world at about this time, divining out of fire and cloud and runes and entrails. We met the spirits that dwell in rivers and trees and the hearts of the stars, and they learned our tongues, and warned us of the great darkness in the north that had cast the whole world into night everlasting ere it was conquered by the Sun’s first rising, and we knew that this darkness must surely have been the same as the foul Voice that led us astray. And so we learned, and we grew, and our names for things flourished beyond all count, and those of us children who dreamed kept on dreaming. But it could not last forever - no good things do, and you would do well to learn that truth now.

The last time I dreamed. I saw the whole of our world, only it was wrong and yet right. We know that it is flat, you see, only what I glimpsed was round, like an egg or an eye, and the oceans were blue and the shapes of the land were strange to me. And there was a great darkness that choked it, winding through it - if I peered at one place for long enough, I saw all the way down to the molten flame that is at the heart of the world, and there was not one place in it that was free of the darkness. And I grew dismayed, and I began to weep, for how could we begin to escape the foul Voice if it was everywhere? I asked this, or else I thought it, but my question was answered. For suddenly, beside the world, holding it in her arms, was the dark-eyed woman who wore the Sun on her shoulders as a cloak, and she looked at me, and without words she spoke.

"The Maker will come to restore what has been rotted,” she told me, and this time when I woke I was not afraid.

All us dreamers had seen it - the same thing, this time, or else the same woman in blue and gold and glory. And we had all heard the same words in our hearts, and we knew. The One-that-Is, the Allfather, who spoke to us before all memory and who shaped this world out of thought and breath, will drive out all shadows.   
This, you see, is the Old Hope, what we cling to through all despair.

When those of us who had dreamed grew strong and long-limbed, and when the great darkness finally stretched its corrupting fingers eastward, we knew we could not remain in our first home. And so we gathered together, as men and women of our clans and peoples, and we all said that we should depart as one. There was much debate and disagreement, of course, because none of our race can ever come together and not debate, and yet in the end we dreamers won out. “We must go west,” we argued, “westward to where the Sun makes her home in the night, in honor of the woman and the promise.” And our wise women and chieftains and elders said that this was good, and so we left.

We have been wandering all these years ever since that day, and in that time we have suffered, and we endure, and those of us who dreamed have one by one grown old and died and been buried in the wake of our trail. I think I must be the only one left, and when I am gone, I can only hope that what I know will not be lost. The Old Hope, my faith is called, and it is scoffed at by the young men and women who do not know it by heart. And so I tell you, that you might weigh it, might carry it - for perhaps, if you do not dismiss it instantly?

You, too, might dream.


End file.
